On December 18, 2000,
Eleen Schrecker posted on the internet discussion list,H-Diplo, a lengthy criticism of my
essay, “The Cold War Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on
Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism” that had appeared in in The Journal of
Cold War Studies.{H-Diplo, 18
December 2000, H-Diplo discussion logs at http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/lists/]My response, posted at the same time, is
below.

I welcome the
opportunity to respond to Professor Schrecker’s commentary on my essay “The Cold
War Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism
and Anti-Communism” in The Journal of Cold War Studies.Her Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism
in Americais easily the most
impressive revisionist book of recent years.Consequently, I give close attention to
her comments.

Professor Schrecker is
“not sure” why I think that historical writing about American communism and
anticommunism will continue “for many years to come.”To her those matters are “redolent of
political antiquarianism,” and have “run out of steam”;and she asks “will the domestic Cold War
never end?”She is not the
only writer to complain.Last year
The New York Times Sunday Magazine, which rarely carries articles about
scholarly debates, devoted a lengthy cover story (eight color photographs, two
full page) to this historical argument.The article,“Cold War
Without End," had a number of themes, but one dominated; a complaint that the
author did not want to hear any more, judging the issue chiefly interested only
Jews concerned about “acceptance and assimilation,” certain persons with
“unresolved feelings of personal betrayal” and the “Oedipal conflicts of
red-diaper babies,” all of whom had failed to “process the news that the war is
over.”[1]Professor Anna Kasten
Nelson in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently brushed aside two
books on Soviet espionage and one on the Cold War with a “it is time to move
on.”[2]One can not help but notice
the fervor and the length with which disinterest to these issues are
proclaimed.It also seems
ill-suited to call upon historians to “move on” because the events in question
are “over” when virtually all of what historians do is about events that are
‘over.’Rome fell a long time ago,
but historical study of the Roman empire is still lively.The English civil war, the American
civil war, World War II, and the Holocaust are over, but calls for historians to
‘move on’ from these subjects would, if anyone were bold enough to make them, go
unheeded.

The Cold War on the
ground is over and the threat of a civilization-destroying nuclear war has
receded.The USSR is no more and
communism, although not gone, is going.Consequently the Cold War and communism are no longer staples of current
politics.But communism and the
Cold War in history are far from over.This past century has seen war, revolution, mass murder, human butchery,
terror, and cruelty on an extraordinary scale. Communism and anticommunism
played central roles in that ghastly century and making historical sense of
these appalling phenomena will be a major preoccupation of scholars in the
coming decades.Further fueling
this is the increasing availability of documentary sources that will allow
historians to understand with greater clarity matters that were ambiguous.The end of the Cold War and the passage
of time will also allow more of the perspective provided by distance from the
events that is one of the virtues of historical scholarship.Far from the antiquarianism that
Schrecker sees as the future for this area, more likely is a flourishing of
historical study of the Cold War in both its domestic and foreign aspects.

Professor Schrecker
takes too negative a view about the availability of new archival records.While some collections available in
Moscow in 1992-95 have been closed, most have remained open and new collections
made available.The Library of
Congress and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI)
have microfilmed the entire CPUSA collection, more than 430,000 pages, and that
microfilm is newly available at the Manuscript Reading Room of the Library of
Congress.This is a massive set of
material and there are hundreds of files in that collection that no American
historian has looked at as yet.In
2002 the International Computerization of the Comintern Archive project, of
which the Library of Congress is the American partner, will make conveniently
available as digitized images a million pages of the records of the Communist
International at RGASPI.Included
in these pages will be all of the documents in the Comintern’s regional
secretariats with hundreds of thousands of pages of reports from local Communist
leaders and C.I. representatives on Communist activities all across the
globe.Far from being a time to
move on, this is a time for historians to move in to these as yet only partially
exploited archival resources.

Professor Schrecker
states that “Haynes overlooks other sources ... FBI files, in
particular....”This is not
correct.In my JCWS article on page
100 I specify that my and Klehr’s Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage is
America is based on “FBI files” as well as the decrypted Venona messages and
Comintern and CPUSA documents from RGASPI.In Venona we said this: “In
the late 1970s the FBI began releasing material from its hitherto secret files
as a consequence of the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).Although this act opened some files to
public scrutiny, it has not as yet provided access to the full range of FBI
investigative records....Even given these hindrances, however, each year more
files are opened and the growing body of FBI documentation has significantly
enhanced the opportunity for a reconstruction of what actually
happened.”[3]

Schrecker is also
incorrect that I overlook “memoirs and oral histories of American
Communists.”Such sources are cited
frequently in Klehr and my books on American communism, and in Venona we state
that “...in this volume Venona will not be treated in isolation.The documentation of Venona is
integrated with a broad range of other corroborative evidence, including
testimony, both written and oral, by a wide variety of persons spread over many
decades.It includes voluntary
statements from defectors from Soviet intelligence, reluctant testimony from
persons under legal compulsion, candid discourse gathered by listening devices,
as well as information available in published works.”[4]

She also says that I
have “not produced the usual more of less disinterested survey of the scholarly
literature on domestic communism and anticommunism.”I have been writing in this field a long
time and “disinterested” surveys are not “usual” in the sense that she and I
would both agree that they are disinterested.Take, for example, Michael E.
Brown’s“Introduction: The
History of the History of U.S. Communism” in New Studies in the Politics and
Culture of U.S. Communism.Schrecker was one of the essayists, all revisionists, published in this
volume.Brown dismissed the
writings of Theodore Draper, Joseph Starobin, and Harvey Klehr, historians whose
work I regard as exemplary, as not scholarship at all, stating that their texts
were only “an extraordinary overtly tendentious type of satire.”Brown linked the appearance in the
1980s oftraditionalist (he uses
the term “orthodox”) historical writings about American communism to “the
introduction of a durable fascist element at the center of the United States
polity,” an apparent reference to the election ofPresident Ronald Regan.In contrast, he praised the work of
Professor Schrecker and other revisionists, commenting that “what appears to be
sympathy” for the CPUSA in their work “is in fact simply a willingness to accept
responsibility for the only perspective from which a critical historiography can
proceed.”[5]

Professor Schrecker
states that since “the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the opening of the
Kremlin archives brings us to the present wave of historiography, one dominated
largely by traditionalists...”As
regard the latter point, I wish I agreed, but at best it is only partially
correct.The new archival material
has energized scholars of a traditionalist perspective, and their work has made
a difference in how many historians now view the era.But in my area of concern to say that
current historiography is “dominated” by traditionalists is an
overstatement.Those historians who
write on American communism and anticommunism in a traditionalist fashion have,
depending on whom and how many you wish to identify, written scores of scholarly
books, some of them path breaking original research, published by a variety of
respected university presses.Yet
these same scholars are excluded from publishing essays in the discipline’smost prestigious journals, the
Journal of American History and the American Historical
Review.Lowell Dyson’s 1972
“The Red Peasant International in America” was the last time any of these
traditionalists had an essay on domestic communism, anticommunism, or Soviet
espionage published in the Journal of American History.The American Historical Review
has a similar record of excluding traditionalists.On the other hand, over these past
thirty-eight years these two journals have published dozens of essays by
revisionist scholars on one or another aspect of American communism (positive)
and domestic anticommunism (harshly negative).I hope this thirty-eight year exclusion
is ending, but it hasn’t yet.

Professor Schrecker also
taxes me for what is not in my JCWS essay, discussions of historical writings on
the FBI and of some of the early work on McCarthyism.She could add I didn’t discuss the major
works from the vast literature on Communism in Hollywood, among central and
eastern European ethnic Americans, or the party’s influence on American theater
and music.The major books and
articles on all these subjects are covered in my Communism and Anti-Communism
in American Life: an Annotated Bibliography, but that was a book of 321
pages while the JCWS piece was an essay of 49 pages.[6]In an essay one must pick a few
major themes and ration the number of books discussed.

Professor Schrecker also
says that I “inexplicably” ignore Robin D.G. Kelley’sHammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists
During the Great Depression.It
is explicable and, in any event, his book isn’t entirely ignored.In my JCWS essay I wrote that “The ‘new
historians’ [as the revisionists of the late 970s, 1980s, and early 1990s often
termed themselves] have produced hundreds of essays and dozens of books on an
astounding array of topics: Communist influence on folk music, drama, poetry,
and various literary figures; Communist activity among Jews, Finns, Italians,
blacks, Mexicans, and Slavs of various sorts; CPUSA support for sharecroppers in
Alabama and Arkansas, grain farmers in Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota, and
dairy farmers in New York; Communist influence on social gospel Protestants,
professional social workers, and socially conscious lawyers; Communist influence
in sports; and Communist activities in the labor movement.”I alluded to Kelley’s book with the
phrase “CPUSA support for sharecroppers in Alabama.”But I did not discuss it specifically
became it was one of many works, some of excellent quality, described my next
statement: “Taken as a whole, this literature is strong on periphery and weak at
the core.”[7]The Black Communists
of Alabama are an interesting topic that needs and deserves historical study,
one Kelley has provided.But they
are very much “periphery.”There
were very few of them, their sharecroppers union lasted but a short while, left
no institutional residue, and had little impact on Alabama history.In terms of the CPUSA, the bulk of
its membership, organizational activity, and impact was in the urban North and
West Coast, not the rural South.American Communists had a significant influence in the industrial labor
movement in the North and far West and on politics in those same areas.Its impact on the agricultural South was
insignificant.

Professor Schrecker also
states that “Haynes is not, I think, particularly interested in anticommunism”
and devotes “little attention to the latter.”The JCWS essay concentrated on American
communism.But my writing shows
ample interest in anticommunism.My
Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota’s DFL Party recounts the
1930s-1940s struggle within the labor and liberal movement in Minnesota between
anti-Communist liberals and a Communist-led Popular Front faction.My Red Scare or Red Menace: American
Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era devotes separate chapters to
“The House Committee on Un-American Activities,” “Varieties of American
Anticommunism” (covering evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics, ACTU, the
Socialist party, Trotskyism, Lovestone, and labor movement anticommunism), “The
Struggle for the Soul of American Liberalism” (concentrates on the ADA
anti-Communism liberalism), “Partisanship and Anticommunism” (discusses
Republican anticommunism and the role of Nixon and McCarthy), and “Anticommunism
at High Tide” (examines the FBI and executive branch legal offensive against the
CPUSA, the development of loyalty-security programs, and the literature of
exposure).[8]

Professor Schrecker also writes that
“despite Haynes’ insistence, espionage is not the main story of American
communism...”I have never insisted
on anything like that.In
Venona, Klehr and I wrote that while “espionage was a regular activity of
the American Communist party... to say that the CPUSA was nothing but a Soviet
fifth column in the Cold War would be an exaggeration; it still remains true
that the CPUSA’s chief task was the promotion of communism and the interests of
the Soviet Union though political means.” [9]Of the seven book that I have authored
or co-authored on aspects of the history of American communism, espionage was a
central theme only in two.

Professor Schrecker also
says she finds “personally offensive” my generalization that “...most of the
revisionists shared a hostility to capitalism, anti-Communism, and the American
Constitutional order....They saw
American Communists, whatever their faults, as kindred spirits in the first
against capitalism and established American institutions.”Let me state the basis for this
generalization.Many revisionists
explicitly defined their historical work as part of a radical agenda.Paul Lyons, an early revisionist whose
1982 Philadelphia Communists, 1936-1956 cited by many as a model
revisionist grass-roots study, stated that he regarded Communists as “people
committed to a vision of social justice and a strategy of social change that
make them my political forebears.And like my biological parents, they merit a love that includes--in fact,
requires--recognition of their faults and errors.Needless to say, such a love also rests
on an honoring.”He stated further
that he regarded his book as a “contribution” toward the achievement of“socialist cultural hegemony.”[10]In a 1985 bibliographic essay, Maurice
Isserman, a leading revisionist figure, allowed that the ‘new historians’ had
their origins in radical political commitment.He maintained, however, that their
perspective later shifted away from a partisan “search for a usable
past.”[11]In his case that was
true, but other revisionists have retained their commitment to blending history
with political action.In 1994
Allan Wald, a revisionist who has published numerous essays and books on
cultural history, most notably The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and
Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980, wrote that
“United States capitalism and imperialism remain absolute horrors for the poor
and people of color of the world, and ultimately hazardous to the health of the
rest of us.Therefore, the
construction of an effective oppositional movement in the United States remains
the most rewarding, and the most stimulating, task for radical cultural
workers.That is why I choose to
assess the experience of Communist writers during the Cold War era from the
perspective of learning lessons, finding ancestors, and resurrecting models of
cultural practice that can contribute to the development of a seriously
organized, pluralistic, democratic, and culturally rich left-wing movement.”
[12]

As for the stance
Professor Schrecker takes toward communism and Communists, in her 1998 Many
are the Crimes she states that “I do not think that I conceal my sympathy
for many of the men and women who suffered during the McCarthy era nor my
agreement with much (though not all) of their political agenda.”Nor has she concealed her attitude
toward capitalism. She concluded the same book with the statement that “only
now, under the impact of a globalized, yet atomized, capitalist system,
political repression may have become so diffuse that we do not recognize it when
it occurs.”[13]

Professor Schrecker
judges my views of American communism to be lacking “complexity” and “nuance”
and complains that I seem “unable to accept an interpretation of American
communism that looks at its achievements as well as its sins (I suppose Haynes
would prefer the work ‘crimes’ here.”She supposes wrong.While I
have likely at some point used the term crime in regard to some particular
aspect of Communist activity, it is not one of my habitual descriptives.It is Professor Schrecker, not me, who
has put the word “crimes” in the title of her book, and she was referring to
anticommunism.

I don’t agree with her
assessment that my approach to Communist history lacks complexity or nuance but
I agree that a historical treatment of communism and anticommunism should embody
those traits.One of the points of
disagreement between us is my view that her approach to anticommunism lacks
those traits.She demonizes
opposition to communism.Fervid opposition to communism, Schrecker explained, “tap[ped] into
something dark and nasty in the human soul,” and she held it responsible for
many of the ills of American society since 1945.Her Many are the Crimes indicted
anticommunism for destroying the civil rights movement’s ties to the
“anti-imperialist left” and thereby “indirectly strengthening [Africa’s]
colonial regimes,” held anticommunism responsible for the Taft-Hartley act and
added “debilitating as Taft-Hartley was, it was not solely responsible for
labor’s disastrous failure to replenish its ranks.Here, again, the anticommunist crusade
bears much of the responsibility, for it diverted the mainstream unions from
organizing the unorganized.”Anti-Communists also bore responsibility for the failure of national
health insurance, driving talented people from government service, and biasing
foreign intelligence and foreign policy analysis.Anticommunism’s baleful influence
included the slow development of feminism, elimination of talented musicians
from orchestras, dull television programing, promoting in Hollywood “the good
guy/bad guy polarization of the Westerns, the unthinking patriotism of the war
movies, the global triumphalism of the bible epics, and the constricted
sexuality of the romantic comedies.”Because of McCarthyism “in the fine arts, for example, serious painters
abandoned realism.” Anticommunism also got the blame for retarding the progress
of science, crippling higher education, and Nixon’s abuse of presidential
powers.Schrecker has stated that
the “term McCarthyism is invariably pejorative” and and has applied that
pejorative term to any opposition to communism.She termed Joseph McCarthy, his allies
and imitators as McCarthyists but added that there were “many McCarthyisms”
including “a liberal version ... and there was even a left-wing version composed
of anti-Stalinist radicals.”Of the
latter, she took the view that “Socialists and other left-wing anti-Communists
functioned as a kind of intelligence service for the rest of the
[anti-Communist] network.”If she
had a positive evaluation for any sort or variety of opposition to Communism in
Many are the Crimes,I
missed it.Weighted in the
balance and found wanting are Harry Truman, the Americans for Democratic Action,
the AFL, the CIO’s non-Communist majority under Philip Murray, Trotskyists,
Lovestoneists, Socialists, Catholics, the FBI, Partisan Review and the
“New York intellectuals,” Sidney Hook, Hubert Humphrey, Morris Ernst, Norman
Thomas, Walter Reuther, and on and on.Not only “many are the crimes,” but many are the
criminals.[14]

Professor Schrecker
calls on us to “understand (not judge, but understand)” what motivated those in
the 1930s and 1940s to cooperate with Soviet espionage against the United
States.Considering her frequent
and harshly negative judgment of anti-Communists of the 1930-1950 era, I not
persuaded by her call for us not to “judge” those who assisted Soviet
espionage.But I agree that we need
to understand their motivation and actions.And I hope, at long last, we are at a
point where that is an appropriate question.As long as the reigning consensus was
that Rosenberg, Hiss, White, and the rest were innocents falsely accused of
espionage this was not an appropriate question.But I would add that historians must
also “understand” why most Americans found Soviet espionage an outrage and
reacted with fury and anger at those Americans who assisted Soviet espionage and
at those political groups and figures who seemed indifferent to this
espionage.And I see no objection
to offering a bit of judgment as well,

Professor Schrecker in
Many are the Crimes says that those who assisted Soviet espionage
“...were already committed to Communism and they viewed what they were doing as
their contribution to the cause ... [and] ... it is important to realize that as
Communists these people did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism;
they were internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national
boundaries.They thought they were
‘building .. a better world for the masses,’ not betraying their country.”Here Professor Schrecker and I have a
basic disagreement.She treats this
as an exculpatory explanation.I
regard it as justifying the suspicion with which security officials regarded
Communist who worked in sensitive positions.If one wished to protect American
secrets, it would be foolish to trust someone whose “political allegiances
transcended national boundaries,” “did not subscribe to traditional forms of
patriotism,” or regarded given secrets to the USSR as “not betraying their
country” but as “building .. a better world for the masses.”[15]

Professor Schrecker
states that “Haynes is not the only critic of my book to take me to task for not
having taken The Haunted Wood into account even though it was published
nearly a year after my own book appeared.”Professor Schrecker is mistaken.Nowhere in my essay, nor any other venue, have I made this
criticism.What I found fault with
was her claim in Many are the Crimes that “a careful reading of the
Venona decrypts leaves the impression ... that the KGB officers stationed in the
United States may have been trying to make themselves look good to their Moscow
superiors by portraying some of their casual contacts as having been more deeply
involved with the Soviet cause than they actually were” and her assertion that
Venona messages regarding Harry Dexter White could be regarded not as espionage
but White “merely making small talk” at diplomatic social events.Because Klehr and I took an entirely
different view of those messages in Venona, I went to some pains in my
JCWS essay to go over this point.In her commentary Professor Schrecker has revised her view of White and
now agrees that he cooperated with Soviet intelligence.At some point, those who have only
lately come to accept the evidence of extensive Soviet espionage in the United
States and the assistance provided to it by American Communists should ask
themselves what in their conception of the history of the 1930s and 1940s led
them to a mistaken conclusion about these matters and how they should change
that interpretive framework.[16]

I hope the members of
h-diplo who are interested in this subject will read my essay in The Journal
of Cold War Studies.Some of
the issues Professor Schrecker raises are also discussed in my response, found
at <http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page47.html>, to her and Maurice
Isserman’s“The Right’s Cold War
Revision,” The Nation (24/32 July 2000).Also at this site is a earlier and
lengthier version of the JCWS essay: “An Essay on Historical Writing on Domestic
Communism and Anti-Communism” at
<http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page67.html>.

Let me close by
expressing my appreciation to Professor Schrecker for her serious attention to
my essay and by thanks to h-diplo for the opportunity to
respond.

notes

1.Jacob Weisberg, “Cold War Without
End,"New York Times Sunday
Magazine (28 November 1999), 116-123, 155-158.These themes prompted one amused Jewish
colleague to congratulate me on having been promoted to the status of honorary
Jew by New York Times.

2.Anna Kasten Nelson, “Illuminating the
Twilight Struggle: New Interpretations of the Cold War,” The Chronicle of
Higher Education (25 June 1999), B6.The three books were Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s The
Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era, John Louis
Gaddis’s Now We Know: Rethinking Cold War History, and my and Harvey
Klehr’s Venona.

5.Michael E. Brown, “Introduction: The
History of the History of U.S. Communism” in Frank Rosengarten, Michael Brown,
Randy Martin and George Snedeker, eds., New Studies in the Politics and
Culture of U.S. Communism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), pp. 21
& 28.By “critical
historiography” Brown meant critical of American society, not critical of the
CPUSA.Authors in this volume
include Rosalyn Baxandall, John Gerassi, Marvin Gettleman, Gerald Horne, Roger
Keeran, Mark Naison, Stephen Leberstein, Ellen Schrecker, Annette Rubinstein,
Alan Wald, and Anders Stephanson.Wald later disassociated himself from Brown’s essay.Alan Wald, “Search for a Method: Recent
Histories of American Communism,” Radical History Review 61 (1995), n.
10, p. 173.

6.John Earl Haynes, Communism and
Anti-Communism in the United States an Annotated Guide to Historical
Writings (New York: Garland, 1987).

7.Kelley, Robin D.G.Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists
During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1990; John Earl Haynes, “The Cold War Continues: A Traditionalist View of
Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism,” The Journal of
Cold War Studies 2,1 (Winter 2000), p.86.

8. John Earl Haynes,
Dubious Alliance the Making of Minnesota’s DFL Party (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984; John Earl. Haynes, Red Scare or Red
Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era, (Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, 1996).

12.Alan Wald, "Communist Writers Fight Back
in Cold War Amerika" in Styles of Cultural Activism: From Theory and Pedagogy
to Women, Indians and Communism, Philip Goldstein, ed., (Newark, Del.:
University of Delaware Press, 1994), 218; Alan Wald, The New York
Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to
the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1987).